Description:

Ingvild Torsen (University of Oslo, Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas) presents "Disinterest and truth. On Heidegger's interpretation of Kant's aesthetics"

Location: Crowe 1-140

Abstract: Central to Heidegger’s philosophical treatment of art is the characterization of art as a “happening of truth.” This means that an artwork should be understood as an event that opens up a way of being for an audience. Heidegger’s approach to art, with its emphasis on truth, is often portrayed as a rejection of the tradition of modern aesthetics, and especially this tradition’s emphasis on taste and subjectivity. I claim that such a portrait is a caricature and that analyzing Heidegger’s comments on Kant’s aesthetics brings out a much more nuanced picture of what is at stake with the notions of subjectivity and truth in modern aesthetics, both for Heidegger and for us.

Unlike his much more substantial work on the first Critique, Heidegger’s take on Kant’s aesthetics has received little attention. Since Heidegger is known in general to dismiss the subjectivist turn in modern philosophy as a confusion with detrimental consequences, one might expect that in the realm of aesthetics, the target of the critique will be Kant, the author of the seminal text of modern aesthetics, which presents an analogous “subjectivist turn.” However, when Heidegger turns to aesthetics and its history in his lectures on Nietzsche and the will to power as art, Kant is not identified as representing such a “subjectivization.” Instead, Heidegger understands Kant and the third Critique’s notion of disinterestedness in particular as a source of insight, offering an interpretation of Kantian disinterestedness as analogous to his own notion of “letting be.”